About Stephanie O’Dea

At the end of the day …

we are tired. We all know we need to cook from scratch and eat healthy food — but there just isn’t enough time. I know. I get it. I’ve got your back.

This is why the slow cooker was invented.

Hi there. I’m Stephanie O’Dea and my passion is helping busy families get the “Have Tos” in life done and over with so there is more time for the “Want Tos.”

And cooking (for me) is a Have To. I’m not the kind of girl who is going to have a zen moment chopping an onion. I’m just not. I truly believe that if you are crushed on time and energy and motivation you can literally change your life just by starting to use your crockpot slow cooker.

Let me show you how.

The TL; DR version:

Stephanie O’Dea made a New Year’s Resolution to use her slow cooker every single day in 2008 and write about it online.

This simple idea resulted in a highly-trafficked website and several books, one of which spent six weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list. Stephanie has appeared on Good Morning America (three times), The Rachael Ray Show (four times), featured in Real Simple Magazine, Woman’s World, and Oprah.com. She is a contributing editor to Simply Gluten Free magazine and a recipe contributor to ABC.com. Further information can be found at stephanieodea.com.

If you have a slow cooking question, or a question about housekeeping shortcuts, the fastest way to receive a response is to find Stephanie online on facebook or twitter.

or the even longer version:

Thank you for visiting my website. I can’t believe this is my life, and now my job, but somehow, miraculously, it is.

that was a lot of commas.

I used to not use my real name online, and instead used: The CrockPot Lady.

In February of that year, I got gutsy and emailed the Rachael Ray Show. I pretty much broke all internet etiquette rules, and told her that I rocked and that she should have me on her show. So she did. You can read about that experience, here.

When the show aired, I began getting emails from book publishers. In 2009, my first cookbook: Make it Fast, Cook it Slow was printed, and it spent 6 weeks on the NYT best sellers list.

My dinner slow cooker cookbook is called 365 Slow Cooker Suppers. Only 10% of the recipes have appeared on the site — the rest are all new.

The newest slow cooker cookbook is a 5 Ingredients or Less –– which was HIGHLY REQUESTED by my readers. 😉 Just like my other slow cooking cookbooks even though there are only 5 ingredients, I have tried my hardest to stick to natural and not-very-processed foods (gf, too!)

Maybe you’ve seen me in the middle of the night in the Ninja Cooking System infomercial. That was a pretty cool experience, and you can read more about it, here.

I’ve been on Good Morning America three times, and George Stephanopoulos called me a Slow Cooking Expert. And you know what they say —- if George Stephanopoulos calls you an expert, it must be true!

I run three websites: A Year of Slow Cooking, Simple Shortcuts to Peace, and StephanieODea.com

We are a gluten free family. All of the recipes on the site and in the cookbooks are completely gluten free. If you aren’t gluten free, simply ignore my notes or file them away in case you ever need to cook for someone with a gluten intolerance/allergy. For a bit more about our glutenfree-edness, click here.